Sunday, January 18, 2009

A Little Floor Plan Porn For the Weekend

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama needs to interrupt our fine and lovely weekend in order to bring the hungry children some serious New York City floor plan porn. The highly anticipated listing for a full floor unit at the posh (and restrictive) building at 834 Fifth Avenue has hit the internets with an expected but still breath taking asking price of $30,000,000...for a two bedroom apartment with monthly maintenance charges of $9,538 according to listing information.

The 13th floor unit is offered for sale by the estate of the fabulously named Araxia M. Buckhantz,. Although Your Mama would like to offer the children all kinds of biographical details about MizBuckhantz, a cursory search of the internets turns up very little 411 other than that she's the cuzzin of monocled "playboy oil magnate NubarGubkian" and that she passed on to the big oil man in the sky in the fall of 2008 at the ripe old age of 101.

The floor plan shows the sprawling 2 bedroom and 3.5 bathroom co-operative apartment has one private elevator landing, 12 rooms, four exposures (north, south, east and west), four fireplaces, 12 foot ceilings, two or three terraces depending how one counts, at least 11 closets including four walk-ins and one cedar lined walk-in, and a staff suite located, natch, behind the kitchen that includes three prison cell sized bedrooms that share a single bathroom and a small servants hall where the live-ins surely kicked off their shoes and gossiped about and mocked the mistress of the house and all her filthy rich friends. That's right. All you rich folks are just fooling yerselvesiffin you think your staff ain't talking shit behind your couture and bespoke suit clad backs.

A 27-foot long entrance gallery leads to a 37-foot long living room which listing information indicates features pulchritudinous paneling from the George III period and access to a narrow terrace that positively hangs over Fifth Avenue and Central Park. A solarium–a somewhat silly architectural folly Your Mama finds is typically reserved for the unusually rich–sits adjacent to and beyond the living room and a guest terlit that offers visitors a soo-blime Central Park view while they do their dirty bizness.

Listing information indicates the library is wrapped in 18th century George II pine (whatever that is) and the dining room, with French doors leading to two terraces, is "castle-like" which Your Mama thinks could either be really good or a complete decorative disaster. The kitchen, which may or may not be renovated and/or up to date, is large enough to eat in (as if people this rich eat in the kitchen) and can be accessed either through a closet lined hallway off the entrance gallery or through the large, windowed butler's pantry adjacent to the dining room.

Each of the two bedrooms have large and private poopers, as they better have for thirty million clams, okay?

Current residents of the obscenely uppity Rosario Candela designed building include Alfred Taubman, the owner of the Sotheby's auction house that recently did a little time in the big house, Harry Crosby, the fifth son of Bing, billionaire banker Mark Rachesky and his wifey Jill who prop records reveal paid $33,444,500 for their dee-luxe doo-plex digs in October of 2007, legendary Broadway producer Harold Prince, and former CEO of Salomon Brothers John Gutfreund whose wifey Susan once famously, pompously and dare we say wisely said, "It's very expensive to be rich." Well, indeed it is Missus Gutfreund.

Other past (or perhaps present) residents of 834 are said to include Charles Schwab, Elizabeth Arden, Leslie Wexner, John DeLorean, Robert (Woody) Johnson IV, and Loida Nicolas-Lewis, widow of food and grocery tycoon Reginald Lewis who were the first–and as far as we know the only–people of color (he was African American, she Filipino-born) to live up with the otherwise very pale-skinned residents of 834.

However, perhaps the king of the money mountain at 834 is the multi-billionaire media mogul who owns the tremendous triplex penthouse in which Laurance Rockefeller resided for some 50 years. Prop records and multiple reports from the time show that back in 2005, Mister Rupert Murdoch and his much younger wifey Wendi Deng scooped up the triplex building topper for a stomach churning, teeth chattering, bone chilling and, at the time, record setting $44,000,000. The couple then proceeded to give the three floor and multi- terraced aerie a massive makeover which reportedly includes a home gym with construction costs estimated at $400,000.

All the New York City real estate gossips with surely be burning up the phone lines and chomping at the bit to get the inside scoop on who tours at the high priced pad and, of course, which mega-moneyed magnate will pass muster with the notoriously persnickety board.

The kitchen, master bath and pantry all seem to be an enormous waste of space. I imagine that if the floor plan were tweaked, an additional room for entertaining or private family enjoyment could have been carved out of the wasted square footage.

To answer the earlier question, according to one of the Observer articles the apartment was originally the first floor of a duplex, which explains why there are stairs shown on the floorplan--and also why it is only a two bedroom. I would imagine that this is an older floorplan and the stairs were removed at some point, but we'll have to wait for photos to see.

The pantry has a sink counter so I'm guessing more of a "butler's pantry" than what most of the children use to stash their cereal boxes and cans of soup.

There is a fireplace in the middle of the wall between the master bedroom and master bath. One could possibly use part of the bath as closet and eliminate the closets between the bedroom and living room to make the bedroom 23.5' x 20.8' but that isn't a lot of bang for the buck. Plus losing the sound buffer between the bedroom and living room....

The public spaces are VERY roomy. How many freakin' people would one want trapsing around their apartment anyway?

This apartment will be a good test of the Madoff Effect on New York property values. Lots of "wealthy" New York families had one-half of their money with Madoff and one half with Sanford Bernstein ... and the rest of the net worth tied up in real estate. Now those families have lost all of the Madoff money, may have to replay to the Madoff insolvency estate everything they received for the past SIX YEARS (count it: that could be about 90 per cent of the total amount invested with Madoff), have lost more than half of the money placed with Bernstein (which has done nothing wrong other than bad investments, as far as I know) ... and have to liquidate much of the remaining real estate PRONTO. Word from Palm Beach is that some Madoff victims have been turning their properties over to auction houses to get some cash FAST ... but with huge losses.

In other words: there's not nearly as much money in and around New Yorlk these days chasing $30 million apartments. To many of those who would have bene buyers a year ago are spending their time these days considering whether to roast the family Pekineses for calories to hold off the hard winter.

I'll guess that these digs will go for, maybe, $10 Million. And the heirs will be happy to get it.

Apartments just don't get better than this, though it will be interesting to see if the market will hold up to support this price range. But I doubt that the Crosby in the building has anything to do with Bing...

This whole sad and sorry Madoff thig really sticks in the gut, as many investors will be all but bankrupted by this. And I agree that this is a big ask, way to big for the current market. I'll take it for 1m.

Not to be critical, but the flow of this apartment is awkward. The lower floor homes have more balance. The master bedroom is small (and I would prefer the park view from my master), there is limited closet space, and there should be more separation between the sleeping areas and the public spaces. It will take a lot of work to bring this apartment up to modern standards. Whew, I just saved $30 million.

Since this is obviously an original floor plan (since it shows a staircase going to an upper floor that isn't part of the original apartment anymore), I wonder how much else has changed over the years? I'd love to go in an apartment like this - but I'd want to see it BEFORE renovation and all original.